Freeware Books

This book along with it's included CDrom quickly earns it's worth in saving you time by telling you what's a good value for spending your money on and getting, and not. It's lay out, approach, and suggestions are on target. Get it!

This book saves one money since it's does the research to sort out the good values. It allows you work faster, optimize your mac, track your finances, and just plain work faster. Get it! And the bonus is that is comes with a great CDrom for $ 18.00!

After purchasing the book, I was amazed at how many applications are already available for the Mac OS X. No one can say the Mac OS X doesn't have enough software written for it. The software disk is a big plus as well. Good job Robert!

Freeware Encryption And Security Programs: Protecting Your Computer And Your Privacy by Michael Chesbro (senior counterintelligence agent with the U.S. Department of Defense) is an invaluable and "user friendly" guide to several of the most popular and widespread freeware encryption and security programs. Freeware Encryption And Security Programs teaches the reader how to use these programs to encrypt private files, work files, email and more. No programming expertise is necessary; only the desire to put in a little extra effort to confound prying eyes overly inquisitive noses. A first-rate, highly recommended book for anyone fed up with the lack of security on the internet.

I think this book is the only one to cover such a broad variety of free security tools. It focuses in particular on the pros and cons of using them in a business setting, including details such as the availability of support, functionality, and ease of use.

There are some very useful grids or feature matrices when a specific product category offers multiple solutions. These are very useful as they allow you to tell at a glance which products have what features. From there you can quickly rule out the products which do not meet your needs.

Grab one at a book store and flip through it, the writing is easy to digest and "friendly" without sounding too clinical.

This book included most of the information I needed to set-up, and run my mkLinux system, but it took a lot of paging back and forth to get the information I needed. Also, there are some missing steps in the info on compiling the kernel which I had to get from a mailing list. Other than that, a decent reference for those with a mac that want to play with linux.

This is the ideal starting point for a non unix human into the weird world of linux.. just follow the dots and it will run ... Sadly the book does not cover some of the bare basics of the OS itself, so while installing is really easy, getting the OS to actually do something is NOT covered... As all linux distributions vary a certain amount some things mentioned in other publications might not work..I had rather seen it included in this book.

This book contains some very good hardware details about the Power Macintosh for people who like writing device drivers for the rest of us. The only reason it only gets four stars is that the documentation has a bunch of bad links. Everything is there, it's disorganized.

This is something every dedicated Mac user should not be without. While Linux is perhaps not the simplest of OS's, this is by far the simplest form of Linux I've ever seen or worked on. If for no other reason the two included CD's are worth the price alone. Although a more indepth basic linux book would be usefull too unless you are well versed in it. Overall I'm well pleased.

Very detailed instructions of installing the MKLinux and nothing else! I would hope there at least is a quick reference for basic setup and configure of the system. No help at all after the system is up running.

It's not that I don't like these books. I do, sort of. As another reviewer mentioned, there are a lot of interesting ideas. There's also a lot of time wasted on the stupid antics of characters who were in a position to do more and ended up smoking 'til their brains were fried, then getting lucky. And that sums up two of the major flaws in these books: the characters are annoying most of the time, and things happen to turn out well because they got lucky, not because they did much of anything on their own. So, not only do these books reek of stoner stupidity, they are also NOT character driven. And that is a HUGE flaw in a cyberpunk novel, which is usually written around broken, down-and-dirty characters who end up doing the right thing even when they don't believe they can (not falling on their butts and somehow still landing on their feet, as Rucker's characters do).

For me, these were throwbacks to the hoary old 'idea' novels and moldy, cardboard characters of the past (sorry, couldn't resist). Frankly, these stories were a drag to read. I normally finish a book of this length in 3-5 days. I've been reading this for nearly a month. And sadly, there IS some funny stuff, and there are some interesting ideas, but the whole thing just meanders in a very boring fashion.
Had this not been an omnibus edition, I doubt I would have read the 2nd and 3rd books. Look elsewhere, say Neal Stephenson, early William Gibson, maybe Elizabeth Bear (who writes like early Gibson), if you want good cyberpunk.

This volume collects three of the four novels in Rudy Rucker's intellectually stimulating and thoroughly enjoyable *Ware series: Software, Wetware, and Freeware. The arc of these three novels carries the reader from the dawn of the 21st century, when humanity's lunar robots reprogrammed themselves for freedom and consciousness, to the middle of the century, the radical future of artificial life, and beyond. In Rucker's mostly optimistic vision of the near-future, robots (from the Czech word for "slave", remember) give way to self-directing boppers (and human-dominated asimovs), who in turn pave the way for the quasi-organic moldies, who themselves become the staging ground for something far more transcendent. Meanwhile, humanity tries as best it can to keep pace with its new neighbors while inadvertently catalyzing their evolution from time to time. An exhilarating intellectual romp!

Rucker's novels work on so many levels that it beggars description. His intellectual and philosophical speculations about the nature of conscious life itself provide the skeleton, his joycean linguistic inventiveness enrobes his fresh ideas in strange flesh, and his sheer joy at being embodied succeeds both in animating his creation and in bringing the genre of science fiction, which has long been decidedly cognitively top-heavy, from the neck down. This is science fiction for people who love the raw stickiness and smelliness of physical existence. Moldies and Meatbops, or, more properly, the novels collected therein, easily ranks as Rucker's SF masterpiece.

Each Of these books are masterpieces of what good modern Cyber Punk should be. If your thinking of just getting one of these books, its inevitable that your going to want the others as well, so do your self a favor and just buy this colection instead.

Colarik's advice is pretty sensible and presented in as nontechnical a manner as possible. I don't think anyone can quarrel about the proferred advice. Though I'm a little dubious of "Executive" in the book's title. Perhaps he's trying to appeal to the ego of the reader. Or perhaps it's just a way to underline that this is not a specialised technical book.

There are explanations of various types of attacks that your computer might meet. And protective, largely preventive countermeasures on your part. For this, the best advice might be to install an antivirus scanner and regularly run it. Along with having it connect to its vendor's website, to download the latest virus signatures. Another good advice is to consider running a firewall. These days, you might not even need a dedicated device. Software firewalls are now quite refined.

This book touches on several subjects without really explaining very many of them. Perhaps written by persons better able to write code than books, the syntax is overly loose and informal. The really useful data in this book would fit about 20 pages. The rest is teaser and fluff, the beginning of an idea without the essence. MacPerl is a wonderful, free tool for the Macintosh, but this book is not worth the price of admission.

To sum it all up, its a hack job and a frustrating read.

I could not put this book down, it made perl SO EASY, I highly recomend this book. It deserves 10 stars.

This book was an excellent introduction to Perl and to using Perl on the Mac. Anyone that has a Mac and has an interest in making their Mac more powerful needs this book. The only beef I have with it is that it should be less ease and more power... it needs more of the advanced Perl information as well as more examples, but these are both small considerations when you see how awesome this book is.

This book is poorly organized and very difficult to read. The authors write in a misleadingly friendly style peppered with lots of happy little exlaimation marks and supposedly literate quotes from somebody's book of quotations. But when it comes to actually explaining their topic, they fall short. MacPerl Power and Ease is not easy to read. It doesn't even make sense most of the way. I've had to go through it several times, making copious notes and drawing diagrams trying to get this stuff into my head. There must be a better way to teach programming than this! The best thing about the book is the CD, which has some very interesting freebies. But don't follow the author's directions as to what's on the CD because they'll just confuse you more.

I'm not aware of a better book for Perl users, but this is not one I'd recommend to an inexperienced person like myself. Though I've mastered almost any kind of program in desktop publishing, multimedia and web publishing, I'm still struggling with Perl.

All I really wanted to know was how to make CGI scripts. I'm poorer, farther behind in my regular work than I should be and I'm still wondering if I'll ever understand this language.

Bottom line: if you're an amateur looking to learn how to program, hire a geek or go to school, but don't expect to learn it from this book!

I'm glad this book was written because I love the Mac OS and want to see Perl developed on it. However, this book is not easy to use. It's clear that the authors do know what they're talking about, but they're not great at conveying lessons to the reader. Some script examples can be confusing to walk through when the authors say stuff like "Let's add this line to the script we've been writing" without telling you where in the script to add it, or what to line to replace. It seems as if they're so excited about the subject of the book that they fail to stick to repetetive teaching conventions (which I personally find very helpful with programming books. I'm sure not everyone does. Call me dry.) I plan to finish this book, but I actually found my C++ books easier to read, and that can't be becuase C++ is easier. I think with some revision, this book could be a great staple for Perl programming on the Mac. Namely: Pick a lesson format and stick with it. Don't just wander through the features of Perl. Still glad they wrote it, though. Viva the Mac OS. If you're an absolute beginner, buy this book if you're prepared to re-read sections. If you're somewhat experienced, this book will probably prove quite useful to you.

My feelings for cyberpunk have turned progressively more negative with the passage of time. More and more, the writing is beginning to sould like an an overly-long stream of existential consciousness with jumbled dialogue, forgettable characters, utterly unrealistic happenings and a plot that redefines that term. SOFTWARE was the best of the trilogy because it was more interesting and at least it was readable.

WETWARE is really a series of vignettes of titled characters. Yes, there is a connection among the various players but on the whole, the work is a rambling barf of images and newly defined terms. Oh those blasted terms! The sheer volume of made-up words, future tech inventions, new speaking manners and hard-to-imagine ideas (the "dimension" thing still makes no sense after repeated readings) makes the book a chore instead of a pleasure. If Rucker had stressed either the terms or the inventions or the new crazed mode of speaking, that would have been sufficient.

Maybe this Brave New World of nihilism, obsession with new experiences via drugs or tech toys, this existence instead of living, this cheapening of life - maybe that is what we have to look forward to but I don't have to read about it. The ending, perhaps meant to be transcendent, instead turns into action-packed silliness. It reminds one of the old novels where aliens from the planet Bogo warn Earthlings to stop their atomic testing or else. To top it off, we defeat these vastly superior species. My grade: D

Evolution continues rapidly in Rudy Rucker's freeware. From bops, big bops, little bops through meatbops we have yet another life form appearing in freeware, and it is sentient mold.

These moldies, being more organic, can interact with humans differently, and in some cases very closely.

More of the burned out beach bum and borg style can be found here.

With all the predictions and future strangeness this comes off as Sodom and
Gomorrah: the characters are mostly seriously morally challenged ( bright like Molly).
It comes off with the feeling that it was written by a person on pot having a dream that turns rapidly into a nightmare.
The ideas of using
aperiodic tiles as computers has so far not had anything but virtual fruit like this.
Written before the current quantum computing doctrines came in
and AI went out of fashion, this novel has a genealogy of humans and moldies
and some sexual content that might be too much for a lot of people.
The two other novels I've read by Rudy Rucker were much better than this one.

I've never thought of Rucker as a great writer, but he never wants for interesting ideas. While his characters tend to be fairly broad and cartoonish, the bright colors of his invented slang and weird technology make for a nice pleasant brain buzz.

In "Freeware", Rucker continues his little AI saga begun in "Software" and "Wetware". The boppers (the little AI robots featured in the first two novels) are all dead, but their spirit (or at least their core software) lives on in the "moldies", who are basically big pieces of self-aware floppy plastic infected with a stinky fungus. Of course what Rucker immediately wants to investigate is: Can you have sex with a moldie? The answer, of course, is yes.

The plot meanders through the backstories of its various characters (which also help shed light on the events which have occurred since "Wetware"), shows off the interesting abilities of the moldies (some of which require some suspension of disbelief), showcases exciting new fictional mind-altering drugs, and eventually comes to the Big Reveal, which I found fairly interesting. Although this sort of thing (I'm not going to say WHAT sort of thing) has certainly been done before, I don't think it's ever been done in quite this fashion.

One major complaint I have about the book is its rather abrupt ending. Rucker wraps things up here in about two pages, as if he was in a rush to finish. A bit more denouement would have been nice.

Basically, if you've read and enjoyed the first two "Ware" books, you're likely to find this enjoyable as well. Anyone who HASN'T read the first two books is advised to start with the first book, "Software", which is a rather short (150 pages) and breezy read.

At his best, Rudy Rucker demonstrates that he can write truly engaging cyberpunk science fiction tales that are heavily infused with his knowledge of mathematics (In real life he is a professor of mathematics as well as a science fiction writer.). I honestly don't know what to make of "Freeware", which is the third of his "ware" novels chronicling the evolution of both humanity and self-replicating AI life. Here he introduces us to "Moldies", a plastic-derived AI life form that has developed an uneasy truce with humanity and colonized the Moon after the "bop" AI life forms were killed off by a virus. Alas "Freeware" isn't as funny as Neal Stephenson's "Snowcrash", though Rucker often tries to be, mixing up fast-paced action sequences with lots and lots of kinky sex. (I'm not troubled at all by the sex, but I've seen it done with more realism and finer literary technique from other science fiction writers.). So hardcore fans of Rucker's work may find "Freeware" quite enjoyable; for me it's a bit of a disappointment.